On the sun-drenched streets of Stratford-upon-Avon, Andy Martin, a Remainer from the farming community, says he doesn’t discuss Brexit with most of his friends, though he is surprised how many farmers voted out.
“They all had the false sense that someone was telling them what to do. But there will always be someone telling them what to do. That’s life,” he said last week.
The division between Martin and his friends perfectly encapsulates divisions in the Warwickshire town two years ago when the EU referendum took place. Stratford voted 52:48 for Brexit, exactly representing the national divide. It’s also a town recently identified by Sussex University as particularly vulnerable to Brexit because, like many neighbouring towns in the west Midlands, it is heavily reliant on the motor industry for jobs. So, after more than two years of painfully slow negotiations leading to last week’s white paper, has the delicate balance between Leavers and Remainers started to tip the other way?
Around the corner in the Edinburgh Woollen Mill, shop assistants Ian and Dave stand by their decision to vote Leave. “I don’t think Brexit will do any harm,” says Dave. But he also says he doesn’t really follow the politics or where discussions have got to. “My faith is strong,” he explains.
Jonathan Baker, the chair of Stratford4Europe, a local pressure group, says that very often where people stand on the issue is indeed a matter of faith rather than judgment. “We’ve often likened it to religion. People hold on to their beliefs regardless of facts or evidence. It’s a kind of emotional thing. What we find is that people who are hardened Brexiters and Remainers will always be hardened Brexiters and Remainers, regardless of what happens.”
Stratford4Europe supported one of few public efforts to bring both sides together. Brexit Cafe is a coffee-morning forum that’s been held twice at the Townhouse Cafe for Remainers and Leavers to air their views and bridge the divide “one cup at a time”. It was the brainchild of Manuela Perteghella and Sophie Clausen, two residents who felt on 24 June 2016 they had woken up in a foreign country, one where they were unwelcome. Clausen is a Dane from, of all places, Elsinore, Hamlet’s home, who decided to face her fears and try to understand what Leavers think. Most often they don’t want her or her family to leave – they just don’t want other Europeans, who they don’t know, to come. “They say, ‘It’s not people like you. You’re OK to stay.’ They think they can pick and choose.”
But plenty of Europeans feel uncertain about the future. In recent years, hotels and restaurants in the town have been overwhelmingly staffed by Europeans. Now speak to people in the industry, and they say that they’re struggling to attract staff.
“We used to get six CVs a week, the vast majority from Europeans. Now it’s six in total for the year, and only two of those from Europeans,” says Fleur Gougoulia, who runs the El Greco restaurant. She says this is a problem for the local economy because, as Stratford has low unemployment but high rents, it struggles to attract workers from elsewhere in England. In any case, she says, Britons remain reluctant to work in the hospitality industry.
I put this point to one local, highly vocal, advocate for Brexit, Digby Jones, the former director general of the CBI, minister for trade and investment in Gordon Brown’s Labour government, and now in the House of Lords. He says it’s the same problem in the care industry. “The government should have announced on day one that anyone working here is welcome. Your job is safe. I would have shamed Brussels – or Berlin, because Berlin runs Europe – into offering the same provisions for Brits in the EU.”
He says the white paper does not give full control over our borders, leaves us still under the will of Brussels and tied to the European Court of Justice. “This is not really leaving the EU.” Yet later, when I ask if he would prefer the position laid out in the white paper to remaining in the EU, he says: “Yes, because contrary to what a lot of people think – and I was on the inside of this as trade minister – Britain never had a lot of influence in Europe. We’ve kidded ourselves.”
No doubt there’s some fine distinction there between importance and influence, but one can understand the confusion that a lot of people feel who are not wedded to either camp. There’s an element – to borrow a certain writer’s phrase – of a plague on both their houses.
There is also reluctance of many local businesses to express an opinion. No one at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where Lord Jones is a member of the Artists Circle, would talk to me, even though I was told they are overwhelmingly Remainers.
“They’re so reliant on corporate sponsorship,” said one reporter at the Stratford Herald, the local paper that’s been actively keeping the debate alive. Whenever the Herald runs a Brexit piece on its website, readers “go crazy”, says reporter Chris Smith. “A Brexit story raises the same kind of interest as a Shakespeare conspiracy story.”
And stories don’t get any bigger than that in Stratford.
Yet manufacturers – who in Stratford had been loud in support of Brexit before the referendum – found their senior executives were all busy while I was in town. One managing director who did speak, anonymously, said the public were angry and confused by the idea of a soft Brexit.
“We have lost most of our bargaining power with the EU before the final deal is struck,” he said, adding that 90% of his employees had voted for Brexit.
When I asked if they still felt the same way, he said there was a large turnover of staff and he couldn’t speak for them. “We now have a number of EU nationals here,” he acknowledged, “and I think it fair to say they wouldn’t vote for Brexit.”
The picture that emerges from Stratford is full of ironies and positively Shakespearean in its complexity. Perhaps the most telling quote came from Martyn Davies, a beamingly youthful-looking 63-year-old refuse collector, who I met as I left town. I asked him what he thought locals thought about Brexit. “They’re clueless really,” he said, emptying a bin. “No one really knows anything.”
